Tgauge is a tool for displaying lm_sensors readings. Instead of boring old numbers, tgauge uses graphical representations designed to look like the gauges on a car dashboard. Or anything else if you care to make a theme for it. tgauge stands for temperature gauge because I designed it mainly for monitoring my CPU temperature.
Tgauge can be run in a window, but it's really meant for use on a panel; it supports the Gnome (version 2) and ROX panels.
Download the appropriate package from the Sourceforge files page. You'll probably need to compile it. For ROX this will happen automatically the first time you run the program from the ROX filer. For Gnome use:
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
then add the applet to the panel using the menu. You'll need the
following libraries, including headers (provided in separate
"devel" packages if you use Debian or RPM packages):
The options window can be opened from tgauge's menu or (not in the Gnome panel applet version) by clicking directly on the gauge. The window is divided into 3 sections:
The topmost option sets the number of gauges. Tgauge can display up to 8 gauges in a row, or stacked vertically on a vertical panel. The rest of the options apply to one gauge at a time so the second widget, Configured gauge, selects the gauge that the options apply to when changed in this window. They are referred to by number, starting from 1.
A PC may be fitted with more than one chip containing sensors, so the Chip and Sensor options let you choose which chip and which sensor on that chip a gauge reads from.
A number of themes are provided, so you can choose one by name with the Theme option. They can also be shown in any orientation using the Rotation and Flip options. The reference direction for rotations is clockwise.
The Minimum and Maximum reading options allow you to calibrate the gauge by setting its limits ie they are the readings at the minimum and maximum values the gauge is capable of showing. Any readings outside the range will show as a minimum or maximum reading. In this context temperatures are always measured in degrees Celsius.
When the mouse pointer hovers over a gauge a tooltip shows the
current reading. You may supply a
printf style format
string with the Tooltip format option to customise the
readout. There is one argument to the format: a double precision
floating point number representing the reading, so you will usually
want to include in your string a %f or some variation giving
precision, eg %.1f for 1 decimal place.
You may choose to have the tooltip reading shown in Fahrenheit instead of the default Celsius by checking the Fahrenheit option. This does not affect the minimum and maximum readings which remain in Celsius.
Older versions of tgauge used gconf to manage options. This dependency has been removed but it now requires a glib version of at least 2.8.
There are some command-line options available when running the non-Gnome version. These are mainly for use by the ROX wrapper script, but some of them may be useful otherwise:
| --rox-plug=ID | ID is the plug id for embedding the program in a ROX panel as an applet. Without this option the non-Gnome version runs in a window. |
|---|---|
| --log-level=LEVEL | LEVEL is the numerical value of the lowest log level that will be printed in the log. Messages at higher levels will be ignored. See GLib's GLogLevelFlags for details of the values. The default is to log everything with a prority of at least G_LOG_LEVEL_MESSAGE. |
| --log-file=FILENAME | The log will be saved to FILENAME instead of printed on stdout and stderr. |
| --app-dir=DIRNAME | ROX programs store all the components of a program within one
relocatable application directory. This option allows the wrapper
script to pass the directory to the program dynamically, otherwise it
has to have been installed in a fixed location with make
install or by a package manager. |
Themes can be installed in the themes subdirectory, either of tgauge's installation directory, eg /usr/share/tgauge/, or of .tgauge/ in your home directory (~/.tgauge/). Each subdirectory of the themes directory represents a theme with the same name as the directory.
The contents of a theme directory are simply a set of graphics files. Currently supported formats are PNG, XPM, GIF and JPEG and the files should have the customary extension. Each reading - usually represented by a needle position - has a filename consisting of a number followed by the extension eg 012.png. There may be any number of files with any numerical filenames, provided that when they are sorted into numerical order they show progressive readings on the gauge. You may also provide a file called background.png (or other suitable extension) as a common gauge background and the numerical files will be superimposed on it. Thus the numerical files need only contain a representation of the needle, but they must be masked (transparent). The background may also be transparent, in which case the gauge is rendered against the default background colour of your GTK theme.
Currently only a theme "source" package is provided at the project's
Sourceforge files page.
Run make followed by make install. You may want to
edit the install.sh script first in case you want to change
the target installation directory.